Chris Selley: Either the Tories are destroying Canada, or they’re not

One of the earliest casualties of Canada’s 41st Parliament was the notion that the Conservatives, having won their majority, would lay down their pitchforks, douse their torches and call-off their hounds. Instead, liberated from the constant threat of defeat, the Tories mostly seem concerned with settling old scores — not just policy-wise, as they had promised, but with the individual Liberals and New Democrats who support the policies they so despise. The opposition parties, meanwhile, have been mounting their shrillest last-gasp defences of those policies, most notably the long-gun registry and the Canadian Wheat Board’s monopsony.

So, it’s a big ball of cartoon violence, just like before. Still, interim Liberal leader Bob Rae said something quite heartening in a year-end interview with the Toronto Star. “I think there’s no question the Tories are doing damage. But I’m not one of those people who says that the damage is irreparable,” he said. “We can always get our country back. We just have to have the political will to do it.”

Obnoxious Liberal “our country” hubris aside — they really do need to work on that — it makes perfect sense for Mr. Rae to say this. The idea that Mr. Harper will destroy the country before anyone else gets a chance to govern isn’t a great rallying cry for a third party heading into a policy convention. But it is also a very welcome, calm statement of rudimentary democratic fact. Canadians are free to believe that Mr. Harper intends to permanently alter the nature of Canada; but as Mr. Rae says, no “damage” a government does needs to be permanent if another government musters the political will to undo it. It just has to make the case.

There’s the rub, of course. Inertia and defeatism are everywhere in Canadian politics; that’s what made Mr. Rae’s statement stand out. In the fall, when the Conservatives announced they would destroy not just the long-gun registry but its associated records, progressives ransacked their brains in a futile search for unspent outrage. “They’re trying to destroy the past,” said Mr. Rae, evoking images of a Doctor Who season finale. “It’s kind of like a scorched earth vandalization saying we’re going to destroy all this, we’re going to prevent anyone from [preserving the data] anywhere else in the country.”

You would think the Conservatives were proposing to bomb Stonehenge. We are talking about a simple database here, a list of guns and their owners. The wonder remains that the Liberals managed to bugger the thing up so woefully in the first place. There is no reason a future government, federal or provincial, couldn’t start from scratch if it could make a rational case to its constituents that doesn’t implicitly or explicitly blame law-abiding gun owners for urban violence or psychopathic rampages.

In November, Allen Oberg, then chairman of the Canadian Wheat Board, told a House of Commons committee that, “once the single desk is gone, it is gone forever.” Now, it would certainly be extremely difficult to re-implement. “Impossible” isn’t too far wrong, certainly in the short-to-medium term. It’s understandable the monopolists fear permanent defeat. But it is still bizarre to hear someone argue that an existing program or policy is unimpeachable and has widespread support, and simultaneously argue it would be impossible to implement if it didn’t already exist. And you hear it a lot in Canadian politics.

On many hot-button Canadian issues, the status quo doesn’t actually stem from especially bold political action. Gun control measures are always an easier sell in the wake of atrocities like the 1989 Montreal Massacre. The Wheat Board was born in wartime emergency, same-sex marriage in the courts. Our abortion-law vacuum stems from a tie vote in the Senate and decades of political cowardice. It is also true that the significance of the changes Conservatives might conceivably implement — unregistered rifles, farmers selling their wheat to different people, term limits on abortion — is wildly overblown. Likely, the most significant changes Mr. Harper hopes to implement exist much deeper in Canada’s federal-provincial machinery, though these too needn’t be “irreparable.”

British Columbia’s Harmonized Sales Tax debate provides an interesting counter-example. The original rollout of the HST, immediately after an election campaign during which then-premier Gordon Campbell had said it was “not on the radar screen,” was a historic disaster. And yet when it came down to a referendum, 45% of British Columbians voted to keep the HST. They voted for a new tax.

The most often-cited moral of this story is that the HST is dead in B.C. for at least a generation, which is an awful shame considering it is such good policy. The more important lesson seems to be that it is entirely possible to sell good policies to Canadians, even if it scares your spin doctors to death, so long as you don’t hide your intentions from voters or screw the whole thing up. If politicians realized this and acted upon it, they could change Canada far more than Mr. Harper can ever hope to.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.